Last Day on Earth: A Portrait of the NIU School Shooter

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A COUPLE DAYS after Steve loses his prison job, he fights with his former NIU friends on WebBoard. It’s an online discussion forum he still has access to. They’re talking about sex offenders. There’s a gay grad student at NIU who works with them and advocates for them, and this is a guy Steve respected. I meet with him in the student union at NIU, and he tells me about a discussion they had once. It was in one of the labs, a place they called the “zoo,” and everyone else had cleared out. “He felt comfortable with me.” Steve confessed his homosexual experiences. “I told him I would share some of my own skeletons in my closet, too, and we were going to have lunch or something.”

But then Jessica is looking around online, because she works in rehabilitating juvenile sex offenders, and she finds this guy on the list. He’s a former sex offender himself.

Steve exposes him as a hypocrite. Disgusting, a horrible, horrible person. Steve is vicious, relentless in his attacks. So vicious that Jim Thomas and Steve’s friends are shocked by the whole exchange. This isn’t the Steve they know. They can’t make any sense of this.

They don’t know Steve has gone off his Prozac. They didn’t know he was on Prozac in the first place.

Steve has an appointment at McKinley on October 16. “Steve stated that he noticed a worsening of his anxiety and obsessive compulsive thoughts with the discontinuation of the Prozac.” He’s still hiding most things from his doctor, though, and lying. “Steve stated that he had decided to quit his job in Indiana. He stated that the commute was too far and the job was taking too much time from his studies.”

Steve starts to spend a lot more time playing online shooter games with Mark. “Sometimes we wouldn’t follow the rules in games, whether it be team killing people [killing your own team]. Or we would pretend we were gay. Steve would do that to see how people would treat you differently if you were gay. And Steve would set up different rules, like making it so you could kill only with grenades, things that were not the norm and would make people mad, just to see how far you could push people, and to see how threatening will they get.”

They have voice communication set up online, so Mark can hear Jessica laughing in the background. It’s fun. But Steve seems to be aware, also, that something is wrong. He decides to write a paper on the connection between video games and mental illness. On October 19, he sends Mark an email asking for help: “Hey, I was wondering. . if you happen to stumble across any articles related to video games and mental health policy, please send them my way. I am specifically looking for articles/journal articles that relate violent video games to a predisposition to chemical disorders, (and actual legislation or law bridging these two concepts together. . such as the Illinois Safe Games Act struck down as unconstitutional just a few years ago). I’m working on research in this area and I hope to get together a publishable paper within the next few months on this issue, (hey, who knows. .). Anyway, I know you’re a news junkie like I am, and would appreciate any forwards if you find anything.”

“In Columbine,” Mark says, “they were playing Doom, he was playing Counter Strike back in 2002–3, and Grand Theft Auto, which obviously is the most violent game, there’s been studies done on video game violence, and maybe people with mental illness, they detach themselves from the emotional part? I don’t know if that’s true. There could be a combination. Maybe for some people it desensitizes. We would play Warhammer on PS3, Battlefield, Call of Duty 4, any of the team-based games. I didn’t tell the cops that, because you guys are just going to twist it around. But he wrote a paper on mental illness and video games, so I’m wondering if he saw a connection and knew himself.”

Steve’s relationship with video games is complicated, also, by his feelings about money and self-worth: “He always felt that he didn’t deserve things, material things,” Mark says, “because of his financial situation before school. He didn’t want to get into that situation again. In the group home, not having money. Spending money now on $300 game systems, maybe he felt he didn’t deserve it, right? Maybe he was worried that he would fall back. He had a problem with holding onto video game systems. He got me into Xbox 260 back in 2006, we both bought systems and played online, and then he sold it, just one day, he got out of it for awhile, said he needed the money for car repairs, then bought a couple other systems, sold those, went through a couple different computers, laptops, desktops, then he got an Xbox again in 2007 and we got back online, because he enjoyed playing online with me, and then up until fall of 2007, then he said he had a problem with the Xbox (later admitted he just didn’t feel he deserved it) and sold it, and he always had a fear that I’d get mad about that, so he wouldn’t tell me.” Steve sold all his things before his suicide attempts in high school.

“Then he got a PS3,” Mark says, “which I didn’t have, so we couldn’t play online with each other, so he tried to convince me to get one. This time he said he saw a psychiatrist about his problem of not holding onto things. And he said she had me engrave my name onto the equipment so it’s harder to get rid of. So he told me he was done, he was past that point, and he wasn’t going to get rid of stuff, and he recognized that he had a fear of hanging onto objects, that he sold them. He said he was confident now and knew he was okay financially. On that Tuesday [February 12, 2008, two days before the shooting], I told him I’d get a PS3 soon.”

Video games are not Steve’s most powerful addiction, though. A few days after his October 19 email to Mark, he goes on a wild spree on Craigslist in the Erotic Services and Casual Encounters sections. He meets a male professor from the biochemistry department at another university. They give each other blowjobs in the car.

He meets others, including “Kelly,” an undergrad at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois. He describes himself, on October 22, as “very gentleman like and respectful in person, but have a wild side. I’m well educated and am confident in bed. I have a few tattoos, love giving oral, (in fact, I enjoy giving it more than any other act, even more than receiving. . which I’m told is rare by guys), and don’t discriminate when it comes to fuller figures, different ethnicities, etc. I am DD free, clean and am in great shape.”

In a later email, he tells her, “We can meet at a coffee shop or something if that makes you more comfortable, but I can assure you that I’m not socially awkward or anything, (actually, I’m probably too social and talkative at times, but I know when to keep quiet, lol).” She says meeting in a public place first “isn’t absolutely necessary as long as you don’t plan to chop me up and store me in my freezer. So. . don’t do that.:)” He reassures her, “I’m not a serial killer/psycho or anything,” and to seal the deal: “Just so you know, I am very oral, and love to give it. . True story: I have a particularly strong tongue, as I used to play the Tenor Saxaphone when I was younger. I’ve never had any complaints:-)”

He drives to her apartment for sex on October 23, 2007. He has to share the bed with a dog, “a cranky old Yorkshire Terrier with a purple rhinestone collar and several missing teeth,” as she describes it, so that’s unfortunate. He’s had an uneasy history with dogs. He wrote a poem at age ten about the first one that died, titled “MESHA”: “Oh, yes! I remember the anxiety I felt when my dog perished into death. I remember when her beautiful lips used to lick me.”

Kelly is cute, long blonde hair, round and busty and wholesome, a bit of a hippie, but he also teases her about being a redneck, coming from a small town. They have a similar dark sense of humor, love the macabre. They’re both excited about SAW 4 coming out on Friday. He has a great time with her, fun sex, up all night. He tells her Jessica is just a roommate and ex-girlfriend who’s jealous sometimes. He’s been trying to get her to date other men, since her jealousy is a drag.

The next day he buys the SAW box set. “Jigsaw is on the cover in plastic,” he tells Kelly in a goodnight email at 5:27 a.m., “so how cool is that???”

“Get something scary for Halloween!” Kelly writes. “Then maybe sometime I can have sex with you when you’ve got a scary mask on. . also in a cemetery.”

So Steve does exactly that. “I bought the Billy the Puppet Mask (i.e. the puppet from SAW) and it is creepy looking! Maybe I’ll bring it up next time I’m out there to scare the hell out of you, haha. Ever want to have sex with the puppet from SAW? lol. I told you that I’m pretty sexually adventurous, and I wouldn’t be opposed to the idea. . Know any good cemeteries?;-) I actually enjoy sex in random ass places, (although I haven’t done it that much), so let me know if you’re ever interested, as I am up for anything and everything.”

“The puppet mask sounds good,” Kelly replies. “It creeps the hell out of me already. I’d hate looking out my peephole to see that, but creepy is good.:) I don’t know any good cemeteries around here, but back home there is a really old scary one on the lake that I have been eyeing for a long time. . Let me know if you find any around here! Also, any empty churches. . I’m pretty much up for anything as well, so feel free to share any ideas you’ve got. . It’s nice to not have to worry that I will offend you or creep you out, because you are just as sick as I am!”

“I’m also glad that I don’t have to sugar coat things and be PC around you,” Steve writes — they love watching Maury, make jokes about sterilization of blacks, about watermelons, about hating Mexicans, etc. — “as I usually have to make an effort to mask my words and contain my dark sense of humor. Oh, and don’t worry Kelly, I won’t ruin the ending of SAW 4 for you or tell you that Jigsaw is really the father of. . Okay, so I didn’t see it yet, but it’s still fun to speculate as to how the series will conclude, (if it will conclude). I honestly wouldn’t mind [if] the creators kept sticking to the recipe of another Halloween, another SAW since the series is *that* good.”

Steve and Kelly consider sex in a public bathroom, and then Steve writes about Jessica: “Anyway, I can’t wait until my lease expires here, as I’m going to start looking for a new one bedroom for next year. My roommate is great and everything, but I just want my own place, as I’m not really used to living with a roommate, particularly one that I used to date.”

Kelly invites Steve to her family Thanksgiving in her hometown, but he isn’t interested and she backs away from the idea, saying she just didn’t want him to be alone for the holiday.